Nibbana
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Copyright © 1997 Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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We all know what happens when a fire goes out. The flames die down and
the fire is gone for good. So when we first learn that the name for the
goal of Buddhist practice, nibbana (nirvana), literally means the
extinguishing of a fire, it's hard to imagine a deadlier image for a
spiritual goal: utter annihilation. It turns out, though, that this
reading of the concept is a mistake in translation, not so much of a
word as of an image. What did an extinguished fire represent to the
Indians of the Buddha's day? Anything but annihilation.
According to the ancient Brahmins, when a fire was extinguished it went
into a state of latency. Rather than ceasing to exist, it became dormant
and in that state -- unbound from any particular fuel -- it became
diffused throughout the cosmos. When the Buddha used the image to
explain nibbana to the Indian Brahmins of his day, he bypassed the
question of whether an extinguished fire continues to exist or not, and
focused instead on the impossibility of defining a fire that doesn't
burn: thus his statement that the person who has gone totally "out"
can't be described.
However, when teaching his own disciples, the Buddha used nibbana more
as an image of freedom. Apparently, all Indians at the time saw burning
fire as agitated, dependent, and trapped, both clinging and being stuck
to its fuel as it burned. To ignite a fire, one had to "seize" it. When
fire let go of its fuel, it was "freed," released from its agitation,
dependence, and entrapment -- calm and unconfined. This is why Pali
poetry repeatedly uses the image of extinguished fire as a metaphor for
freedom. In fact, this metaphor is part of a pattern of fire imagery
that involves two other related terms as well. Upadana, or clinging,
also refers to the sustenance a fire takes from its fuel. Khandha means
not only one of the five "heaps" (form, feeling, perception, thought
processes, and consciousness) that define all conditioned experience,
but also the trunk of a tree. Just as fire goes out when it stops
clinging and taking sustenance from wood, so the mind is freed when it
stops clinging to the khandhas.
Thus the image underlying nibbana is one of freedom. The Pali
commentaries support this point by tracing the word nibbana to its
verbal root, which means "unbinding." What kind of unbinding? The texts
describe two levels. One is the unbinding in this lifetime, symbolized
by a fire that has gone out but whose embers are still warm. This stands
for the enlightened arahant, who is conscious of sights and sounds,
sensitive to pleasure and pain, but freed from passion, aversion, and
delusion. The second level of unbinding, symbolized by a fire so totally
out that its embers have grown cold, is what the arahant experiences
after this life. All input from the senses cools away and he/she is
totally freed from even the subtlest stresses and limitations of
existence in space and time.
The Buddha insists that this level is indescribably, even in terms of
existence or nonexistence, because words work only for things that have
limits. All he really says about it -- apart from images and metaphors
-- is that one can have foretastes of the experience in this lifetime,
and that it's the ultimate happiness, something truly worth knowing.
So the next time you watch a fire going out, see it not as a case of
annihilation, but as a lesson in how freedom is to be found in letting
go.
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Source:
http://world.std.com/~metta/lib/modern/nibbana.html
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